Recipe for Sun Fire X4500 RAID-Z Config with Hot Spares

The below command configures the disks in a Sun Fire X4500 as a single ZFS storage pool with 8 RAID-Z.4+1 stripes and 6 hot spares. ZFS dynamically stripes data in the pool across all of the stripes. Note that this runs over multiple lines.

The server has six controllers each with eight disks and I have built the storage pool so that the hot spares are staggered across the controllers to spread I/O evenly and to enable me to build 8 RAID-Z stripes of equal length. Six hot spares may seem a lot, but it was either six spares or have fewer and make the RAID-Z stripes in the storage pool different lengths.

With 500 GB SATA-II disks this gives a usable capacity of 14 TB. Note that the capacity of a 500 GB disk as seen by Solaris is 466 GB.